Google News Archive to Bring Old Newspapers Online

Google has announced a new effort to digitize old newspapers and make them readily available on the Internet.

The expanded Google News Archive will let you search for print publications from decades ago and see them in their original form. Content, naturally, is being added bit-by-bit. Some highlights of history are already included, though, such as a 1969 article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the first steps on the moon. Newspapers are being imported in their entirety, including smaller articles and even ads.

“Stories we’ve scanned under this initiative will appear alongside already-digitized material from publications like the New York Times as well as from archive aggregators and are marked ‘Google News Archive,'” Google Product Manager Punit Soni explains in his blog. “Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we’ll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well,” he explains.

As of now, you can access the archives through both the Google News Archive page and through the timeline option on Google News search.